marc ian barasch on the mind/body connection, illness, new-age calvinism, and spirituality:
“This is one reason physical illness shows up as a turning point in so many spiritual biographies or as the catalyst of shamanic initiation. It’s a profound shock to the system. It dislodges you. You look in the mirror, and one of the unfortunate ill stares back. But in a way, you could say that disease also abrades away, painfully, all of these superficial ways in which we judge our worthiness, even life’s worthiness. Our worthiness, as in: "Am I strong, beautiful, competent, undamaged goods?” Or life’s worthiness, as in: “Life is good only when it makes me happy, or aggrandizes me, or favors my enterprise.” But who’s bigger, you or life? There’s a Rilke poem Robert Bly has translated: “This is how he grows - by being defeated, decisively, by ever greater beings.”
This attitude contrasts with that of the new-age movement, which supposes the mind can become sovereign over the body or “you make your own reality.” The belief is that your pure intentions will make life happen in a particular way, enable you to control things. Now, intentions can be powerful, but I wonder if this overemphasis isn’t fueled by a sense of outrage at the perceived injustice that we should be subject to the frailties of the flesh. If only we can make our spirits pure enough, our intellects bright enough, the new age seems to say, we shall never die. Death is perceived as an insult to our sense of ourselves as being a spirit or a mind.“
